The Age of Innocence eBook

As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his
eyes rested on a large photograph of May Welland,
which the young girl had given him in the first days
of their romance, and which had now displaced all
the other portraits on the table. With a new
sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead, serious
eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young creature
whose soul’s custodian he was to be. That
terrifying product of the social system he belonged
to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing
and expected everything, looked back at him like a
stranger through May Welland’s familiar features;
and once more it was borne in on him that marriage
was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think,
but a voyage on uncharted seas.

The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old
settled convictions and set them drifting dangerously
through his mind. His own exclamation:
“Women should be free—­as free as
we are,” struck to the root of a problem that
it was agreed in his world to regard as non-existent.
“Nice” women, however wronged, would
never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded
men like himself were therefore—­in the heat
of argument—­the more chivalrously ready
to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities
were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable
conventions that tied things together and bound people
down to the old pattern. But here he was pledged
to defend, on the part of his betrothed’s cousin,
conduct that, on his own wife’s part, would
justify him in calling down on her all the thunders
of Church and State. Of course the dilemma was
purely hypothetical; since he wasn’t a blackguard
Polish nobleman, it was absurd to speculate what his
wife’s rights would be if he were.
But Newland Archer was too imaginative not to feel
that, in his case and May’s, the tie might gall
for reasons far less gross and palpable. What
could he and she really know of each other, since
it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow,
to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable
girl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for
some one of the subtler reasons that would tell with
both of them, they should tire of each other, misunderstand
or irritate each other? He reviewed his friends’
marriages—­ the supposedly happy ones—­and
saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate
and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent
relation with May Welland. He perceived that
such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience,
the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she
had been carefully trained not to possess; and with
a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming
what most of the other marriages about him were:
a dull association of material and social interests
held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy
on the other. Lawrence Lefferts occurred to him
as the husband who had most completely realised this
enviable ideal. As became the high-priest of